Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro

Courageous and confident recap -

Concerned faith.

V. 12-14

The example of Rahab’s faith now shows itself in her concern for others.

True saving faith doesn’t stay bottled up inside of us.

It grows in concern for others.

As I have dealt kindly with you now deal kindly with me

Rahab knew what was going to happen.

She was living in a military city.

Why not just leave the city we might ask?

What would have happened if she and her family left.

She lied to the king and then disappears, they would have likely been hunted down and killed.

Rahab wanted assurance from the men that when the city was taken, her kindness would be repayed.

She wanted safety for herself, and for her family, and wanted a sign to show it.

The men responded in two ways, they pledge their word, and more than that, they pledge their lives.

Their lives were already in Rahab’s hands.

But she new, in reality, her life was in God’s hands.

This truth is the same for us as well, is it not?

Rahab did not have to save the spies, she owed them nothing, but chose to hide them because of her faith in the Lord.

We are saved because Jesus, who owed no debts, was willing to become surety for us.

Jesus is the guarantor of a better covenant.

As we sang Jesus Paid It All earlier, did that thought cross your mind?

Jesus paid it all because he pledged himself as the guarantee.

He died for us, and as long as he lives, our salvation is secure.

Because of the promise of his word and the guarantee of His eternal nature, we have confidence that Jesus is able to save completely and forever, those who come to God through Him, because He always intercedes for those who come to Him.

Spies response to Rahab begins in verse 14 and is reiterated later.

Our life for yours!

If you won’t give us up, we will deal kindly with you when the Lord gives us this land.

This is quite a significant contrast to our own faith.

If Rahab talked, she would be killed either way.

In our relationships with Jesus, He wants everyone to know what He has done for us.

How He has paid the price for our redemption.

He has taken us from the effects of sin.

If Rahab talked too much, her life was in danger.

If we don’t talk, we put the lives of the lost people around us in danger of eternal punishment.

Does our faith cause us to be concerned for those around us?

The great commission that Jesus gives his followers is not go become a christian so you can have the perfect life, to live and prosper for yourselves.

Jesus tells his followers to go.

Make disciples.

Teach them to obey everything He commanded.

True saving faith will not stay bottled up inside.

It can’t stay inside.

God wants us to share what He has done in our lives with others.

Covenant faith.

V. 15-24

After the spies make their promise, Rahab lets them down by a rope through the window in her house.

She again provides them information for their safety, telling them to go into the hills for three days or the men sent out to find them will encounter them.

Before the spies leave, they make a covenant with Rahab.

Remember a covenant is an agreement, a contract between two or more parties with conditions laid out that the parties will obey.

It was a covenant that God initially made with Abram that through him all the families of the earth would be blessed.

It was a covenant that God made with Abram that

The spied did not know how God would give the city over to the Israelites, so what they gave her was a symbol.

A scarlet cord so that everyone would know who she was.

Often in biblical covenants, God appointed some physical or material “token” to remind the people of what had been promised.

His covenant with Abraham was “sealed” by the rite of circumcision (Gen.

17:9–14; Rom.

4:11).

When God established His covenant with Israel at Sinai, He gave the people the tablets to be kept and both the covenant book and the covenant people were sprinkled with blood (Ex.

24:3–8; Heb.

9:16–22).

God gave the rainbow as the token of the covenant with Noah (Gen.

9:12–17)

God gives us as Christians the broken bread and the cup of wine as tokens of the New Covenant (Luke 22:19–20; 1 Cor.

11:23–26).

Just as the Israelites placed the blood of the lamb on the doorposts at the passover, Rahab placed the scarlet cord in the window of her home.

It was not the act of placing the blood, or in Rahab’s case, hanging the cord that saved any of them though.

It was the one true God.

Hanging the cord saved Rahab as much as partaking in the Lord’s supper or being baptised does for us today.

Tokens give us neither assurance or salvation.

When we get to the time of Christ, this was one of the great misconceptions amongst the Jews, that the symbol of their faith, circumcision, saved them.

They ignored the spiritual meaning that God intended.

Rahab was a woman of great courage.

She had to tell all her relatives about the coming judgment and the promise of salvation, and this was a dangerous thing to do.

Suppose one of those relatives told the king what was going on.

She also had to give a reason for the scarlet line hanging out her window.

Jericho was shut up preparing for war.

It isn’t likely that there were people outside the walls; but a stranger coming into the city for safety might have seen the scarlet cord.

Someone else visiting Rahab’s house might have asked about it.

The spies left Rahab’s house and hid until they were sure their pursuers had given up the chase.

They returned to the camp of Israel and gave Joshua the good news that the fear of the Lord had brought the people of the land to a place of helplessness.

Rahab not only brought hope to her family, but she also gave great encouragement to Joshua and the army of Israel.

Rahab’s saving faith, her turning from her culture to the Lord was part of a greater plan.

I would like us to turn to one more place this morning.

Read with me if you will beginning in Matthew 1

Rahab the prostitute, the Canaanite woman, was the great great grandmother of David.

None of the people alive during that time could have seen God’s plan.

God’s plan to bring his son to earth through a line of people that included gentiles.

The once Canaanite prostitute, condemned to death, becomes a member of the prestigious royal line leading to Christ.

For us to look at Rahab is to look in a mirror at ourselves.

To use Paul’s words in 1 Cor.

“… that is what some of you were” (1 Cor.

6:11).

Rahab the outsider reminds us of what we were all like once—“outsiders,” pure and simple.

To look at her is to glimpse ourselves as God saw us before we came to Christian faith.

That glimpse ought to confront us with an uncomfortable truth: Our natural bent toward rebellion still occasionally drives us back across the line into our old outsiders’ ways.

It shreds all our claims to righteousness and purity; it shatters any claims we have of good things we might do.

We may not have been prostitutes before Christ, but in God’s eyes we were just as awful in our own way.

Rahab’s courageous, confident, concerned, covenant faith reminds us of the ugliness of our own sin, and should lead us to appreciate all the more the work of God’s grace in us.

It ought to remind us how far we have come since we first believed, or perhaps convict us in how little we have tried.

We were all once prisoners to sin, pardoned for the death sentence we deserve.

We owe are lives to God.

Rahab provides us with an example that hits us where we are in our culture today.

So much around us is seeking to place itself before God in our lives.

Will we make the counter cultural decision to place God first.